With Europe’s economic problems well publicized, politicians and technocrats on the old continent regularly trample over each other in the rush to point fingers of blame. Yesterday, Viviane Reding, the commissioner responsible for the EU’s justice portfolio, got in on the act. \”The time of the troika is over,\” Reding said at a citizens\’ dialogue in Heidelberg, Germany, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Just when you think it\’s safe to go back to Europe stocks, it starts to get murky. Portugal has been coughing up plenty of political worries, which got bond yields pretty heated up last week. And now, it\’s Spain\’s turn, possibly.

Greece is back in the news Friday. A deadlock over whether to shut down the state broadcaster is eliciting fresh fears that the government coalition could fall apart.
Those fears have helped push bond yields up dramatically.

Already beset by a sell off across emerging markets, Greek bonds continued to slide Thursday as the political machinations played out. An International Monetary Fund threat to stop its aid to Greece also hit bonds.

It\’s been a bad week for Greece and an even worse past 24 hours. And it stands to potentially get much worse, heaping pain on what\’s been a relatively calm few weeks in euro-land.

Greece\’s two biggest labor unions called for a major strike on Thursday to protest the shock closure of the state television company.

Reports say viewers saw TV screens go black as the government pulled the plug, calling it a \”haven of waste.\” Some journalists were reportedly holed up inside the headquarters of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corp.

Talk about a mea culpa. The International Monetary Fund has admitted that it has made a number of big mistakes over the last three years in its handling of the bailout of Greece, which has been the epicenter of the euro zone\’s long-running sovereign debt crisis.

Some are hailing it as a victory of sorts for the U.K. government and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, but the International Monetary Fund\’s \”softer\” criticism of austerity measures still carried a bit of a sting.

Futures do a good job of predicting energy prices but not metals, the International Monetary Fund said as part of the world economic outlook released Tuesday.

The IMF cited a forthcoming paper on the topic. They note from between 2009 to 2010, copper prices rose more than 100%, yet 12-month futures predicted a rise of just 3%. Other metal commodities including lead, nickel and tin displayed similar patterns.

Energy futures by contrast did a good job of predicting prices, the study found. Click here to see the IMF\’s chart on the subject.

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